Local Area Networks are becoming increasingly common at the office and in industry, where networking enhances productivity by providing improved sharing of information and specialized equipment. Such networks typically consist of an expensive, high capacity server host computer serving a number of relatively less expensive type 286, 386 or 486 Personal Computers as client hosts through which individuals may access the server and specialized equipment. Each host within the network requires an interface apparatus commonly known as an adapter that performs a role intermediate of the host and network for the reception, buffering and transmission of data by the host.
Critical for the usefulness of the PC clients, which comparatively are minimally endowed with speed and memory resources, is an efficient adapter architecture that can allow network communications to proceed in parallel with other computer operations without excessively slowing those other operations. Also critical to the efficiency of the entire network is a need that the adapter have minimal latency in the reception and transmission of data. At the same time, the adapter must be economical to be suitable for accompanying inexpensive computers.